2023/09/01 · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation #Historical Architecture and Urbanism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/jsah.2023.82.3.250
openalex publication_date 2023/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As often happens in academia, our research project originated with an unsuccessful fellowship application. And yet, if our proposal to address Australasian perspectives on architectural history had no luck as a fellowship proposal, the project took on new life as a symposium titled “Australasia and the Global Turn in Architectural History.” We issued invitations in fall 2021 and notified our list of contributors in December 2021. Hosted by the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) at the University of Melbourne, the symposium was held both online and in person on 27 April 2022 (Figure 1). The event also served to mark contributions made by Australian and New Zealand scholars to the latest edition of the venerable and problematic survey of architectural history originated by Banister Fletcher in 1896, restyled in 2020 as Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture. The arrival in Australia of Murray Fraser, general editor of the new Banister Fletcher, as the recipient of the prestigious Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne following two years of border closure because of COVID-19, made the symposium even more timely. The symposium in turn laid the foundations for the JSAH Roundtable presented here.Our symposium thus had two aims: on the one hand, to celebrate the twenty-first edition of Banister Fletcher, with its increased attention to Australasia; and on the other, to open a wider discussion of under- and overrepresentation, and to examine key issues demanding further exploration in global narratives, including gender, ethnicity, and migration. Each of these two aims became the focus of a separate session at the symposium. The first, on the Australasian presence in global histories of architecture, featured presentations by Murray Fraser, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Deidre Brown, Amanda Achmadi and Paul Walker, and Philip Goad. The second session, exploring the limitations of global histories, featured Mark Jarzombek, Vikramāditya Prakāsh, Paul Memmott, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, and Karen Burns (Lori Brown was unable to join due to a previous commitment).1We developed our pitch for a JSAH Roundtable even before the symposium took place, after we participated in an online SAH member meetup with JSAH editor David Karmon and associate editor Alice Tseng on 11 March 2022. Following review by the JSAH Editorial Advisory Committee, JSAH accepted our proposal under two conditions: that we foreground the presence of Australasia, and that we engage emerging scholars in our proposed dialogue. We were glad to agree to the conditions, as in fact we had already begun thinking along those lines. In June 2022 we issued a new round of invitations to the symposium participants to inquire whether they were willing to continue as part of the roundtable project, and we also invited additional contributions from new and emerging voices in Australasia and beyond. Our call for contributions elicited more interest than we could accommodate, but we hope to engage with this broader group of scholars in the future.This JSAH Roundtable presents dialogues between established and emerging scholars both within and beyond Australasia. As the result of our instigation and the participants’ subsequent investigations, we believe the contributions speak for themselves. In the essays that follow, the authors reflect on their own work: many write about their firsthand experiences as contributors to literature resulting from the global turn in architectural history, and all reflect on how their methods fit into, struggle with, or expand upon new global frameworks. Moreover, all the essays are intertwined by a decolonizing thread. Studies by Murray Fraser, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Paul Walker and Amanda Achmadi, and Solmaz Mohammadzadeh Kive point to a transnational dialogue around the potential for (un)evenness in global histories, while Vikramāditya Prakāsh and Mark Jarzombek explore issues of voice and representation. Both Charmaine ‘Ilaiū Talei and Rujivacharakul discuss the vastness of the ocean and its potentialities for movements, and Rujivacharakul’s reflections on trade also intersect with Walker and Achmadi’s analysis. Paul Memmott and ‘Ilaiū Talei foreground Indigeneity in defense of a cross-cultural approach. Walker and Achmadi’s and Soon-Tzu Speechley’s discussions of nationalism and the nation-state versus the region, as well as their explorations of tensions between the local and the imperial (globalizing but not yet global), gain further nuance from their juxtaposition to the religious case study examined by Jasper Ludewig. Ludewig also contributes to the discussion relating to issues of diaspora initiated by ‘Ilaiū Talei. Karen Burns and Lori Brown, along with Prakāsh, present a timely dialogue on rights and rights-based historiography. Philip Goad’s ten points direct us toward the future, and Prakāsh’s planetary approach exemplifies the kind of ethics that may guide us in this work.We would like to thank everybody who has been involved in making this project’s first two installments, the ACAHUCH symposium and this JSAH Roundtable, a productive exchange of ideas, positions and positionalities, knowledges, and experiences that find value as well as challenges in the global approach. We are excited by the intergenerational, transnational, and cross-cultural dialogues generated here following our symposium, and we look forward to their future development in Australasia and beyond.2The symposium held at Melbourne University in April 2022 to discuss Australasia’s position in global architectural history raised a number of important questions about historiography.1 Yet equally it became apparent that these questions not to the of global architectural history but are of all the for how to discuss how to address architecture, how to and how to and of the of contributions to architectural not often this of issues are in global to as And yet that not but it also additional about the presence of within our to in the twenty-first edition of Banister Fletcher with its of global architectural by that the of histories with by and in the further by in and about imperial in Banister to the within global architectural histories, an by the new edition of Banister Fletcher, for a 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